Palm Beach gets its own restaurant week

Some 50 restaurants will participate in the county-wide event.

Michael Wurster is the new chef at Malcolm's: The Art of Food. (Malcolm's: The Art of Food/Courtesy )

May 31, 2012|By John Tanasychuk, Staff writer

Broward County puts restaurants on sale for a month every October. Miami-Dade has been doing it for 10 years every August, during Miami Spice.

So it's no wonder that Palm Beach County is finally getting on board with its own county-wide restaurant week, taking place Sunday through June 9.

For Palm Beaches Restaurant Week, some 50 restaurants from Boca Raton to Jupiter will offer three-course lunches for $20.12 for lunch and $30.12 for dinner. It's organized by Shamin Abas Public Relations, which specializes in luxury clientele.

"I've been soaking in restaurant week in New York for years," says Abas, president of the eponymous company with offices in West Palm Beach and New York. "People literally plan their visits to the city to coincide with restaurant week and hundreds of restaurants are clamoring for participation. And that's what we want Palm Beaches Restaurant Week to grow into."

The timing couldn't be better, according to the Palm Beach County Convention and Visitors Bureau, which estimates restaurant sales drop 20 percent during the summer.

"We're just a locally owned fish house," says, Russell Beverstein, owner of Russell's Blue Water Grill in Palm Beach Gardens. "We have to be very frugal about how we spend money. This was an opportunity to touch a lot of people without a big out-of-pocket expense. This is about food and foodies. That's what we do. We have a big bar scene, but we're really a back-of-the-house, food-driven restaurant."

Restaurants paid as little as $250 to take part in the program.

Michael Wurster, chef at Malcolm's the Art of Food at the Omphoy Ocean Resort in Palm Beach, sees the event as a perfect opportunity to introduce local customers to the resort's new restaurant. The restaurant had been run by Miami chef Michelle Bernstein until Wurster arrived in February from New York.

Wurster has introduced what he calls a menu of "reinterpreted tongue-in-cheek" restaurant classics that includes chicken pot pie, meat loaf and Dover sole meuniere.

"Having done restaurant week so much in New York, I wanted people to really see our food," says Wurster, adding that portion sizes during restaurant week will be the same as on the a la carte menu.

Thierry Beaud owns two eateries participating in restaurant week: Pistache in West Palm Beach and PB Catch in Palm Beach.

"For us, what's great is it allows us to meet new people," Beaud says. "For instance, at Pistache, a lot of people might be intimidated that it's a French restaurant and it's upscale. But with the value menu, they might try us and maybe come back.

Beaud, who has been in the restaurant business in Palm Beach County since 1995, says business doesn't drop off in the summer as it once did.

"On the island in Palm Beach, the seasonality is still very much stronger than what we find at Pistache on Clematis," he says. "Year after year, we find more and more people staying here year round. A lot less people travel for shorter periods of time. We used to see our people go up north or to Europe for the entire summer. A lot of those people travel now for only a few weeks."

Abas says the island's restaurants were the first to organize a restaurant week in June 2009, which grew to an entire month.

"But it only covered the island, and there's so much more great dining throughout the county from Wellington to Boca to Jupiter," Abas says. "And while there's also Flavor Palm Beach in September, we wanted to provide a restaurant week during the summer."

jtanasychuk@tribune.com or 954-356-4632. Read his blog at SunSentinel.com/sup and follow him on Twitter at @FloridaEats.

Palm Beaches Restaurant Week

When: Sunday through June 9

Contact: For a complete list of participating restaurants and their menus, log on to PalmBeachesRestaurantWeek.com